Thoughts on service:

• Anyone with an indie game (and they are quite specific that you must be a small/lone dev only) can sign up as a developer, submit a game and get it on the site at your own price: very welcome and they sound far less like gatekeepers (a la Steam) and more like caretakers
• Any game will suffice, including game jam titles and arty stuff that might not even count as a ‘game’:  again a very interesting choice although quality control could be an issue, however…
• Customer rating on games: they say this should allow the cream to rise to the top, so less content and quality filtering by themselves leaving it to customers to rank titles – and we all know they are the harshest critics of all!
• 75% revenue share, 85% if you include their SDK which summons forth from hell allows achievements and leaderboard integration:  if they sign up 100 games before the end of the year, the share goes up for everyone.
• Indiecity Underground: Alpha/Beta/Full release testing, pay-to-finish with complete freedom on how you charge or don’t for each step along the way, including upgrades between each and peer-review process tied to store release:  very nice to have the ability to do this, but considering the number of games from lone devs that have appeared on forums then vanished from existance within a few months I wonder how they are going to police this when devs start disappearing with people’s alpha-testing money with no full release ever arriving. It’s inevitable really, so I hope they have procedures in place.

Thoughts on website:

• Why do I have to sign up just to browse the store? How irritating. This almost puts me off the entire site. Let me browse, play trailers and get demos to my hearts content and when I take the plunge and pop something in my basket to buy THEN and ONLY THEN make me sign up for an account.
• You have to download and install a download client to download the downloads. It’s like I’m back in the 90s. The only client I’ve ever installed is the GOG.com one because I love those guys. But Indiecity are a brand new player in town and they need to make it as quick, simple and as easy as possible for people to just get to and download the games. Every extra step, web page, click is losing customers and is, to be honest, giving me doubts about bothering to sign up at all.
• There are still some areas not complete such as the search bar, users own XP/achievements next to games you have bought and the customer review function.

I will be keeping my eye on this to see how it develops over time but it shows promise if they can reduce the front-page to download number of steps. If it works out I can see this being a hit along the same lines as Smashwords was for ebooks – a simple way for creators to get their ideas out to their audience that doesn’t rape them on revenue percentage, rights, uncontrolled pricing or tightly controlled exposure.

Links:

http://developers.indiecity.com/   – Developer info page

http://store.indiecity.com   – you might get taken straight to a sign-in page, if not you can click on one of the scrolling game images and get linked straight to a game so you can at least get some idea of how the ruddy thing looks and works without having to give them your firstborn

http://forum.indiecity.com/index.php   – Forum index with some interesting discussions and info in there already

* And if you get that reference you can officially call yourself old  >>sob<<

If you go there you can browse and buy books in multiple formats (for iPhone/iPad, Android, PC, Palm, etc), and if you’re an author they make it really simple to get your work out there for no charge with extensive online formatting and submission help.

So, if my short stories are free on Smashwords why not free on Amazon Kindle Store? Only reason is because Amazon don’t let you sell an eBook for free. In fact the minimum you can sell for is 99c/86p. However they do price match, so if they see it’s free on Smashwords they might drop the price down on their store too.

It’s all new for me, but I’m learning things every day! Oh, and enjoy the free stories

If you like skin-crawling stories that don’t dive fist-first into bloody horror stuff then you should find something to like. The book is called Making Gods and it’s available for 86p/99c in an instant.

I am also in the process of writing a full novel but wanted to get some material out there first for exposure and also to get my head around the technicalities of creating a Kindle file. Took me a whole day to work out a process from beginning to end that resulted in a properly formatted eBook with a cover, table of contents and .ncx file.

Once I’m 100% sure it works (the collection has been uploaded and tested) I will upload a .doc/page on www.hungryblackbird.com detailing the process, which should hopefully be of help to others attempting to get into self-publishing.

And for those not sure about self-publishing who would rather keep sending manuscripts to the big publishers in the hope of winning their lottery, please read some of the posts here for enlightenment.

Was $5000, now it’s $50,000. Which means my previous post about UDK is somewhat redundant in terms of the royalties remarks.

This alone makes the engine a much more interesting proposal for indie developers, especially those in it for the long haul.

Buggers didn’t even let me know with an email or anything… disappointed I’ll miss it (too short notice), but if there are any tickets left I highly recommend it for any indies.

I’s called Construct, a free open-source 2D game creator and it’s by the guys at Scirra. I compared it with GameMaker 8 from YoYoGames, a very similar piece of software, and for my purposes Construct beats it in almost every way.

The main difference it that it is much more of a piece of development software, with variables and settings exposed to the user, whereas with GameMaker, there were so many variables and rules they could only be gotten at by drilling down through several levels of pop-up dialogs. So much stuff could easily be forgotten, and in a larger game hunting around for a bug would be a nightmare.

I know GameMaker is well established with many great games on their website, but for it to appeal to me it would need a ground-up re-write. For any 3D games I decide/have time to/have money to/am made enough to make, Unity Indie is the obvious (and pleasingly multi-platform) choice.

Currently working on a basic prototype of the game featuring the main gameplay elements with placeholder art. Won’t have any screenshots to show for ages. However I’m also working on some concept and some actual art, one piece of which currently adorns the new website.

Never been to the Channel 4 building for a start, I’ve only been to London a handful of times so it was interesting to see another area of the city I’d never visited. The ’4′ logo statue outside was covered in umbrellas, which was slightly incongruous given the 24° heat outside. We were in the Channel 4 cinema, the metal-walled ante-chamber of which is situated directly underneath the walkway up to the front door which we could see through the toughened glass ceiling. I felt like I was stuck in a 2002 Half-Life MOD. Quite eerie.

• After a cup of tea and a short intro, the first speaker was Chris Delay of Introversion who gave us a special preview of their new game Subversion. All I’d seen and heard of the game so far had been some technical discussion about generating cities so I had no idea what to expect. What we got was a very detailed and very funny demonstration of a bank heist (one of many things you can do in the world) that got a huge round of applause at the end. No coincidence that when I heard all their previous games were now £5 on Steam I went and bought the next day!

• Next was the softly-spoken Terry Cavanagh of VVVVVV fame who gave an informative talk on jams including TIGSource and The Games Collective. Not something I’d ever considered, being someone who likes to take the time to mull over things, but a nice insight into the scene.

• Sean Murray of Hello Games, developer of Joe Danger (just released on PSN), gave us an interesting talk about his and his team’s inspirations, collaborative development and gave a fantastic construction/architecture analogy regarding the difference between AAA development and indie games. AAA games are the commercial skyscrapers – they need millions to build and must have detailed plans from the off to get backing. Indie games are individual boutique houses – a singular vision that stands out from everything elseand typically run by one person. Problem is, publishers only recognise a house as a house when the roof has gone on, which is far too late for the indie who needs the capital for the foundations. Also interesting in that he said PSN was the only way to release a game on console without a publisher.

• After a short break, Steven Lavelle admitted his presentation was really boring so did a ‘tell us about yourself’ session instead which, although slightly awkward to start with, did give a good insight into the sorts of people who had travelled to the conference.

• Following him, Tom Betts admitted he was a graphics whore. But then considering he is doing a PhD specialising in generative art and interactive games, you can forgive him! His was an extremely interesting talk which touched on some thoughts of mine about indie game graphics and how they are stuck in a retro ghetto.

• Then just before lunch, Eskil Steenberg gave us a demo of the LOVE game tools he had created, specifically the dynamic, real-time UV unwrapping and procedural texturing tools. Eye-opening stuff, but I wager well out of the league of most indie devs.

Buffet Lunch! Mmm, spicy chicken spring rolls, micro hot-dogs, ham salad baguettes, fish-and-chips on a stick.

• Simon Oliver of Hand Circus (he made Rolando for iPhone) was next and gave an infectiously enthusiastic run down of the games he had developed and his inspiration behind them.

• Sophie Houlden then gave a brief talk, greatly hampered by reading her notes off a PSP screen, about her thoughts on indie development.

• Cliff ‘Cliffy’ Harris of Gratuitous Space Battles fame gave a superb talk (uncluding the hilariously messed-up slides) about the money side of being an Indie Developer. Namely, how you won’t make any. At least not if don’t take the business side as seriously as the development side. Really useful stuff – made tons of notes.

• The afternoon break gave way to Nicholas Lovell, founder of Gamesbrief and experienced businessman gave us some of his tips on Marketing, Finance and permission or lack of. Good stuff although a few too many plugs for his book for my liking, but then again when you’ve got a captive audience… 

• Gobion Rowlands of Red Redemption then gave us a good background on his company and the new climate modelling game they were creating.

• Alex Chapman from Sheridans solicitors came on and gave a brief run-down of some points of law that indie developers need to be aware of. He didn’t go into too much detail – for that I guess you need to pay him – but he brought up some things I wasn’t aware of.

• Next up was Amy Casson from Littleloud (yeah, I’d never heard of them either). She gave us a talk about how she used Actionscript in her development. To be honest, not much of interest for the non-Flash developers and also none of her flash games would work which was a shame. But it did get me checking out the Channel 4 website to look at their Bow Street Runner, which I hugely enjoyed!

• And to round things off, well-known PC games journalist Kieron Gillen of RockPaperShotgun (and writer of Marvel and Image comics to boot) gave an update of his Freeplay Melbourne 2005 conference speech How to Use and Abuse The Gaming Press… He talked about how indie developers can and should advertise themselves, how to get your name heard, how to get your games known, and how to be clever about it.

After that it was down to the pub around the corner where the upstairs had been booked for us. Now I’m not the most social animal around strangers, but everyone I did get to talk to was overwhelmingly friendly and enthusiastic and there was quite a mix of people: experienced indies, newly indies, those still at big publishers, press, scouts, oh and Nicholas was hawking his book

Overall it was a fantastic conference with a good variety of discussions, some more useful than others but I’m sure everyone’s definition of ‘useful’ will be different to mine such was the variety of people there. The tea breaks were times of active discussion, although some people were hard to get a word with, being quite popular. I’m almost certain there will be another one next year, given this one sold out so rapidly. All the talks were videoed and will be up online eventually so we’ll get to see what the feedback was from those who missed it, but it was well worthwhile from my point of view and I can’t wait to do it again!

Lots of “game changing”, “new paradigms” and “future of entertainment” – the usual PR-speak nonsense. Ignoring all that guff, there are really only a handful of things that have piques my interest, and a couple that left me feeling very disappointed:

+1 Nintendo 3DS – WANT. ONE. The technology looks amazing from the hands-on videos I’ve seen (e.g. Eurogamer) and the list of games they are lining up, with a nice selection of brand new plus updated N64 titles sounds fantastic!

+1 Playstation Move – Wasn’t really bothered by either Natal/Kinect or Move, but there’s something about the solidity and responsiveness of Sony’s version of motion control that just tingles me better.

-1 Kinect – Ignoring the name that sounds like a stapler tumbling down a flight of stairs, the evident lag is a concern as are the games shown. This seems to be much more of a ‘Wii copy’ than Move and I get tired enough waving the Nunchuck and Remote about let alone my whole body. Will still be cool to navigate menus with – hey, there’s an XBLA game idea: “Menu Revenge!” Copyright me.

-1 Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword – Sigh. I love the Zelda games, but this was shown off way too early. I understand it’s a big title for them and they want to explain how the Motionplus is integrated, but the main draw of the games for me is the story, the characters and the world they create. All we saw was what amounted to a training video featuring the usual line-up of enemies in some rather basic environments. They should have kept this back for GDC or later – the 3DS would have been enough.